About my first refeed on the keto diet.

Yuck, it's Monday.

Well, I've been pretty busy hammering out programming stuff all weekend. I have been more than a little worried about my energy levels on the "keto" diet I began on Saturday of last week. I tried doing a carb-up day beginning on Thursday night and including all of Friday. I ate a pizza over 2 meals on Thursday night and had 2 slices for breakfast on Friday morning.

The short-term differences were immediate and drastic. I felt sluggish and bloated, but at the same time stronger. At our early workout session (due to my flex time every second Friday) I set a personal best with a squat of 205lbs for 3 reps. This is 25lbs more than my previous personal best single rep squat (albiet, this was a month ago, and I hadn't tried to up it since). I also noticed that I drank much less water than I have been while in the "keto zone".

The carb-up is to replace muscle glycogen levels that have been severely depleted through a week of near-zero carbohydrate intake. You may also have heard this refered to as a "refeed". Basically I take a break from my no starchy or processed carbs diet for a 24 hour period of clean carbo-loading and passive recovery. The idea behind this is to allow my body to repair from toeing the overtraining line on my current 5 day high-intensity training schedule.

Well, sorry for the lack of science behind today's blog, but it is Monday, and I'm busy as heck between my day job, my consulting, my lovely girlfriend and the gym. Tune in tomorrow for new content!

Setting goals.

Over the last week, I asked each of my workout partners what their goals are in the gym, and I was simply shocked at the answers one said "to be in better shape" and the other said something along the lines of "so i feel better". My response to both was something along the lines of "how do you know when you get there?"

Personally, I set quantifiable goals. Even though I'm not much of a numbers person, I like to use them to measure stuff (which seems like an obvious use for them to me). My goals usually start with a qualitative bent, and often start off sounding like my December 1st goal of this year, to "be ripped for summer". Though this is a perfectly valid and realistic goal, it's tough to tell when I get there, so I will at that point try to reduce it to numbers. For instance, using the goal above, when I started this goal I was about 140lbs and 25-30% body fat, so I had to gain some muscle to show off, and lose the fat concealing it, so i broke down my goal into two parts, "get big" and "get lean".

These were two separate goals that had to be achieved to meet my main goal of being ripped for summer, but they are still not numbers. The next part of breaking down my goal was to assign numbers to these sub goals. I decided that I had 45 days (a month and a half) to get my weight up to 160 on a bulking diet/workout regimen high in protein, carbohydrates and intense workouts. I also know from previous fat-loss experience, that my six pack won't show until my body fat drops below 10% (around 6-8% i think). This gave me something to shoot for, numbers wise. By February 15th (when I purchased my scale), I was up to 165lbs through my bulking diet and regular weight lifting. I had surpassed my first sub goal, I knew this because the numbers told me so. It was time to begin the cutting phase.

My body fat levels had dropped a little bit, coming down into the 20% range, so i decided that by may-long I wanted to be able to see my six-pack. As I stated above, this is quantifiable as having under 10% body fat, so I began working on a limited calorie version of my bulking diet. I managed to get to under 15% in 4 weeks, but I began to see the predictable slowing of my progress as the reduced calorie /fat diet took it's toll on my mental stability and my metabolism. On march 1st, 2009 I began a ketogenic diet to try it out, and I saw my losses speeding up again (might still just be water weight loss at this point though).

This is how I set my goals. I find that having wantifiable goals helps me remmeber not to give up and helps me to stay motivated through slumps. I'm not sure how clear I was in describing my process, as I'm a tad foggy from the keto, but I hope it helps someone. Just remember to stay motivated and keep working toward your goals.

Terminator Workout 1

I'm pretty busy with the day job today, so I'm just going to post my new workout program and the theory behind it. My schedule is pretty busy, but I manage to handle my full time job, a part-time consulting schedule and still make time for my 3 day split on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, gymnastics on Tuesday and Thursday, and a cardio session 2-4 days a week, often at 6am before work.

As I'm changing my diet over to keto starting this week, I need to change my workout as well. My goal right now is getting ripped; strength and size are a secondary consideration.

I call this new set of workouts the terminator series. The basics of the theory here is to do high-intensity strength workouts with lots of compound lifts. It involves wiping out the machines from my workout schedule, everything is done with free weights. Every lift is explosive, every movement is done in 3 sets of 8 with as much weight as possible, drop sets and rack-runs are employed whenever failure is reached. The exceptions to the 3 sets of 8 are bodyweight exercises such as parallel bar dips and pull ups.

** The new workout plan **

Since my schedule allows for Mon, Wed and Fri to be lifting days, every weight day includes my favorite basic strength builders:
Squats
Dead Lifts
Bench Press

On Monday, my lifting partners and I perform the 3 basic lifts, and add:
parallel bar dips (in 3 sets to failure)
military press
dumb bell incline press
barbell rows

On Wednesday, after the 3 basic lifts, we add:
SLDL
Standing calf raises

On Friday, after the 3 basic lifts, we add:

pull-ups (in 3 sets to failure)
seated cable rows
alternating DB curls